An ongoing edible adventure

Travel Eats - Lithuania

06 December 2009

I was delighted when Guardian UK's Been There approached me about writing a guest post about my top 10 eats so far, after 5+ months on the road.

The list in my post"Eating Her Way Around the World" covers Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and hopefully suits a range of budgets. (Well, except the uber-posh / silly expense account bracket, given my own financial limitations.)

Above all, I focused on a list of eateries that for me captured a sense of place and local flavour.

I hope it's helpful and enjoyable list for all you hungry travellers out there!

09 October 2009

I couldn't stop staring at the sky in Vilnius. The clouds here don't just have personality, they have violent mood swings. At one glance it'd be a heart-(or at least balloon) lifting azure, like this view of artist colony Uzupis ...

... In another glance, it'd be that particular shade of grey that foretells some disaster or tragedy of divine proportions, like at the Archcathedral Basilica below.

I'm not sure if this was originally meant to be some kind of victorious or majestic pose, but the broody Baltic sky here makes this statue of the medieval King (I can't remember his name, apologies) of these parts look like he's about to sleepwalk off a precipice.

These changing tides of light and dark became for me a metaphor of the city's own story. Now better known as a happy-go-lucky party-hardy stag do venue, it wasn't so long ago that Vilnius went through a dark era purging just about all of their Jewish population during the Nazi campaign in World War II, then lost another good chunk of its inhabitants to Soviet progroms in the post-war years.

Below is another combination of images that reminded me of the dark history just below the city's light-hearted skin: On the left, newlyweds engrave their names and wedding date on locks and attach it to Uzupis Bridge for good matrimonial luck. On the right, on the outside walls of the Museum of Genocide Victims housed in the ex-local KGB HQ (2a Auku St), are the names and lifespans of those who are believed to have been executed by the KGB inside the building. The walls cover keep going over a heartbreaking amount of space, a good number of the individuals would have been only teenagers at the time.

07 October 2009

The culinary highlight of our Vilnius visit back in mid August was without a doubt Restaurant Zemaiciai (mentioned in a standalone feature and my soupy roundup of Eastern Europe), which in my mind might just be the nirvana of tavern cuisine. But I thought to also quickly share a few other food finds if you're planning to visit.

Busi Trecias, which translates to "And You're The Third", is Vilnius's first microbrewery. It offers a plethora of flavoured beers while maintaining economies of scale, by ingeniously (or sneakily?) having just a light and a dark brew, then adding a shot of the appropriate syrup for the flavour ordered. We sampled honey, lime and pink grapefruit beer, and enjoyed all 3.

The food menu has dishes with enticing names like "Witch's Tears", which eventually translates to various well-flavoured combinations of meat and stodge. Babs did have, however, a lovely grilled whole trout.

Come to think of it, for all this talk of meat and stodge, Babs and I had plenty of fish in Vilnius. There was a lot of smoked and cured herring about, and it being the start of mushroom season, there were soused girolles aplenty to go with the fish. This particular dish below was the highlight for us at Chaplin Bar (yes, named after Charlie), which had an otherwise ho-hum menu.

Another good place for herring (and food in general) is Cozy, which manages to add a splash of flash and style without compromising on the quality and generosity of the food. Cozy's renditions of the usually unphotogenic pork and mash, and lasagne (below) aren't just pretty to look at, kudos to them. There's also free WIFI, and a DJ bar at night.

31 August 2009

Sometimes I imagine what hell might be like. Firstly, I imagine it's customised, so that eternal suffering is maximised for each person. In one of my many imagined versions, it's always mid January in Eastern Europe (yes in this version I suppose hell freezes over). And the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld (or a real Nazi, given the location and history dialed to the right year) bellows at me "NO SOUP FOR YOU!" unto all eternity.

*Shudder*

It's enough to make me behave. And slurp as much soup as I can as summer winds down in Eastern Europe. I wanted to share with you my most souperb finds. The Berlin film scene has its Golden Bears; I thought I might hand out a few Golden Bowls. If you have nominees to add, I'd love to hear from you!

For Best Ensemble Performance of a Soup Menu, the Golden Bowl goes to Restaurant Zemaiciai in Vilnius, Lithuania. The richness of their soup stock blew me away, be it the very dramatic borscht with pork rib, sorrel soup with smoked meat and quail's egg, or the humble but powerfully executed potato soup. This kind of deep sweetness in a stock you can only get from a lot of lovely bones, and time. Cheating by using MSG tends to leave a hollow after-tinge. Good stock is not hard to make, but many restaurants don't have that kind of patience.

For Best Art Direction, the Golden Bowl goes to organic restaurant AED in Tallinn, Estonia. Kudos for keeping this cute island of summer sprouts so pristine amid a red sea of beetroot.

For Best Performance Featuring a seasonal ingredient, the Golden Bowl goes to the mushroom soup at U Babci Maliny in Krakow, Poland.

Very ballsy with the boletus, and brought out in a giant bread basket to boot!

And now for a few special mentions.

For successfully making me miss every Jewish mother who ever had me at their dinner table while I was a student at Brandeis, the 2 winners are both from Krakow (natch).

CK Dezerter's beef buillion with liver balls; and U Babci Maliny's borscht with dumplings. Special congratulations to the latter for living up to its name -- Babci Maliny means Grandma Raspberry (and she has the colour on all her walls to prove it) Maseltov!

And last but not least, for a very special booby "Surprise Supplies" prize (say that 3 times fast), the Golden Bowl goes to the hot and sour soup by Chinese restaurant CBET BOCTOKA in St Petersburg, Russia.

My heart sank when they brought this bowl below to our table. It sure didn't look hot or sour. And it was a lot larger than the 2 small portions we ordered. Were we going to get charged for an order completely lost in translation?

Turns out, it WAS hot and sour soup, just not the usual gloopy orange Szechuan kind. And very delish at that! Surprise!

And yes, they didn't charge us for 2 portions. They charged us LESS. Babs and I counted the portions we had from the bowl below. We counted 6. Supplies!

The perfect tonic for being caught in the rain earlier in the day. And it made me feel souper smug for ordering our food in Chinese.

But enough with the gawdawful jokes, before it becomes your personal vision of hell. I shall repent by spending this week working on uploading my (soup) stock tips, and recipes for chicken soup, mushroom soup and tom-yum soup for you. Look out for them!

U Babci MalinyUl. Szpitlana 38 Krakow, Poland +48 12 421 4818 (Note: Most guidebooks -- even the restaurants own website -- still show a Slawkowska 17 address, but this location has closed. Thanks to the kindly building security guard who sent me on to the Szpitlana location)

24 August 2009

Imagine a wooden platter. Strips of fried bread. Chunks of cheese. Cloves of raw and pickled garlic. Slices of pig tongue. Crunchy strips of pig ear. Wedges of snout sausage. A separate platter has a long strip of crispy pork belly, part-cut at intervals, so it's easily torn into chunks. Soused herring and girolles. Goose crackling. Pickles of all sorts.

And that's just the beer snacks. To go with the long line of pints. With doubleshot vodka chasers.

Then out comes the main course. It's called "Pitchfork". Because a life-size pitchfork is used as a meat skewer. Its 3 prongs hold 6 palm-sized steaks; 2 beef, 2 pork, 2 chicken, each about an inch and a half thick. The drippings get caught by a platter of roasted courgettes, eggplant, tomatoes and potatoes on a wooden platter, held below the pitchfork leaned and fixed at an incline.

This is the exact moment I missed you -- my lovely fellow food dorks -- most (among many moments) on this trip so far. This is why we all need to go back to Vilnius in Lithuania, to the cellar tavern Zemaiciai. So that we can order the same. So that I don't have to just gawk shamelessly at the table of 5 portly and increasingly ruddy-faced Lithuanian "uncles" seated at the table next to us. With enough of us, we might even be able to order other things on the menus. Magical things called "Half-metre eel" and "Half-metre sausage".

But you're not here. So on this evening Babs and I are destined for humbler fare. Namely, the Zeppelin platter aka the Stodge Sampler -- potato derivatives done 5 ways: 1) Pancakes; 2) Plain boiled dumpling, 3) Meat dumpling, 4) Curd cheese dumpling, and 5) Mashed, stuffed with mincemeat, then breaded and fried. Served on a bed of mild horseradish, and with a bowl of sourcream.

It's occured to me I've never seen Babs thump his fist on the table to motivate himself to keep eating through the pain -- the result of eating everything on his preceding very delectable herring starter plate. Yes, including the 3 boiled potatos, and all the sourcream in the onion cup.

But he did eat through the pain. We both did. And waddled back to our hostel feeling (and no doubt looking) like Zeppelins. And then! Came back the next day for lunch, backpacks and daysacks and all, just before we got on the bus to Riga.

And this time we sat outside. And got the beer snacks. Wahey!

We stank on the bus all the way to Latvia. And couldn't stop grinning the entire way.